Endangered Material Knowledge Programme

JOB VACANCY - Senior Administrator: African Histories and Heritage Programme

The deadline for applications is 9 October, so be sure to get your applications in!

For further details on the role, and to access the application portal, please click here: https://bmrecruit.ciphr-irecruit.com/Applicants/vacancy/9066/Senior-Administrator-African-Histories-and-Heritage-Programme

Recognising the significance of access to information, the 74th UN General Assembly proclaimed 28 September as the International Day for Universal Access to Information in October 2019.

This international day aims at spreading awareness concerning the need to expand laws related to information and their actual implementation. UNESCO provides a platform and frame for all the stakeholders to participate in international discussions on policy access to information in the digital era as it empowers individuals, enables informed decision-making, fosters innovation, and promotes inclusivity and social progress.

The knowledge collated and recorded as part of EMKP-funded projects is made available under Creative Commons licences in an open-access digital repository hosted by the British Museum. To date, the collection holds over 30-thousand records, including images, videos, maps, fieldnotes, 3D models, and more, and is accessed by users across the world.

To access this Repository, please click here: https://drs.britishmuseum.org/EMKP

Are you thinking about applying for one of our EMKP grants? Do you have questions about the application process?

On Tuesday 29 September we will be hosting the first two of nine online webinars:

> 11.00 BST - Documentation Grants (English)
> 15.00 BST - Legacy Digitisation Grants (English)

Join us for presentations about the application process, and ask any questions you may have about the documentation and legacy digitisation grant schemes. Both of Tuesday's sessions will be given in English.

If you would like to attend, please click here to fill out our registration form: https://forms.gle/dNhcU7fojsuyqN4j7

For other upcoming webinars, please see slide two.

IMAGE CREDITS // 1. Micaela Anguaya Jetacama, 2023 / 2. Dayana Carmen Mayorga-Paredes, 2023 // ALL IMAGES LICENSED UNDER CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

This week, Head of the EMKP Paula Granados García and previous EMKP Grantee Renas Babakir presented a talk at 'Making the Museum: A conference on the historical presences and absences of makers and making in museums' at Linacre College in Oxford. This three-day conference considered the way that makers and making have been understood and represented in museums, both historically and in the present day.

In the afternoon, Paula and Renas gave a presentation as part of the first panel, entitled 'Recentring the Knowledge Holder's Voice and Lived Experience in the Museum Ecosystem'. Their talk examined how the EMKP digitally documents the knowledge-holders voices and perspectives. Renas Babakir’s EMKP project, 'Documenting the Lost Practices of Felt and Felt-Making in the Foothills of the Zagros Mountains', offers a compelling example of this approach, with the Pitt Rivers Museum collections serving as a crucial point of entry for this work. While the materials and finished objects were already present in the collections, the voices of their makers, and the contexts in which they were produced, were largely absent. These collections enabled the team to reconnect with community practices and identify potential practitioners. Furthermore, through a collaborative effort with the museum, contemporary felt-makers and their work were incorporated into the collections, helping to bridge historical holdings with living traditions through the perspective of the knowledge holders themselves.

Thank you to the Making the Museum project team for inviting Paula and Renas to speak, and for hosting a fascinating conference! If you would like to learn more about the conference, please click here: www.prm.ox.ac.uk/making-museum. If you would like to learn more about Renas' project, please follow this link to our repository: https://www.emkp.org/felt-making-zagros-kurdistan-iraq/.

Last week, the EMKP attended a Stakeholder Consultation meeting and subsequent public launch event celebrating the relaunch of the Culture in Crisis Programme. This event marks the transfer of the programme's management from the V&A to the British Council.

The Culture in Crisis programme works to create a forum for those across the heritage preservation sector to discuss issues and explore opportunities for collective action. Specifically, the programme aims to combat cultural loss and support those communities who are suffering, whether this loss is caused by conflict, criminal acts, or the impacts of the climate crisis.

Our thanks to the British Council for inviting Paula, as a representative of the EMKP, to what was a milestone event in the fight against heritage loss.

📢📢 CALL FOR APPLICATIONS 2026/2027 📢📢

Do you have a project idea to document or digitise endangered material knowledge and practices? Would you like to be part of a broad international community of researchers, practitioners and knowledge holders?

Click here to learn more about the EMKP Documentation and Digitisation Grants and how to apply: https://www.emkp.org/grants

The deadline for applications is 12.00 GMT, 1st December 2026.

IMAGE CREDIT // 1. Mark Jackson, 2022 / 2. Richard Carlton, 2022 // ALL IMAGES LICENSED UNDER CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

TRAINING WEEK 2026 - EVENING, DAY 5 🍽️

We celebrated the end of the week with a traditional pub dinner close to the Museum!

Training Week 2026 was a brilliant experience and will help grantees enter the field with the confidence to undertake exceptional documentation projects. Here's wishing them the best of luck, and we look forward to keeping you updated as their research progresses!

TRAINING WEEK 2026 - AFTERNOON, DAY 5 🖥️

In the afternoon were the final sessions of the week! Taking the documentation footage they created during their session in Organics Conservation, the grantees edited together an example video, in the style of what they will eventually upload to the EMKP repository. This was a great opportunity to try out their editing and annotation skills firsthand.

Once the videos were ready, the grantees presented their final creations to each other, the EMKP team, and the Conservation team who were kind enough to join us. It was wonderful to see all of the skills learnt across the week put into practice by the grantees, and this session enabled important peer discussion about what makes a good documentation asset.